The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  The chair in question was a massive carved affair with handrests formed of small wooden cat heads which Sigrid had unaccountably lugged home last spring when she found it abandoned on the sidewalk near her old apartment building. Roman had reupholstered the back and seat in a dark red velvet and that made a perfect excuse for bringing in two room-sized oriental rugs in soft red tones.

  Behind the couch a row of windows looked out into their small courtyard and Roman had filled that space with ferns and palms and a baby Norfolk Island pine. It was nothing to do with her, Sigrid warned him. "I've murdered my last plant. Either I water things too much or not enough and I'm tired of throwing out pots of dead vegetation."

  So far the plants seemed to be flourishing.

  Through the years, Anne had given her several framed photographs and Nauman had recently presented her with a playful sketch done in vivid gouaches, and these added vibrant color to the rooms.

  Her bedroom, however, remained free of anyone else's touch. Except for a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and a dark green carpet, no brilliant hues had crept in here. Her comforter was off-white, as were her lampshades. An armchair near the bookcase was an indeterminate beige, and on a nearby wall hung black-and-white line drawings, reproductions from the Morgan Library's collection. Sigrid did not believe in yoga or meditation, yet there were times when she retreated to this bare room and sat looking into those ascetic late Gothic faces until her own calm was restored.

  While Oscar busied himself with lunch, Sigrid changed into more suitable working clothes of gray slacks, white shirt, and a baggy off-white corduroy blazer with deep pockets that had seen her through several springs and autumns. With her left arm out of commission, she decided to dispense with her shoulder bag; so that meant a gun harness worn under her jacket with the rest of the items she normally carried stuffed in her pockets.

  Getting dressed was difficult enough; doing anything with her shoulder-length hair was impossible, for she could not reach behind with both hands. She wound up carrying a blue scarf out to Oscar, who had unloaded a tray of sandwiches onto her dining room table.

  "Would you mind?" she asked, trying to gather her hair into position with her right hand.

  "Sit down. I don't know why you don't just leave it loose," he grumbled. He liked her hair and thought it a waste that she kept it so confined. "What's the point of long hair the way you treat it?"

  "It's easier to take care of." She bent her head so he could get at the job better. "I don't have to keep getting haircuts every two weeks or worry about it flopping in my face. I can braid it, pin it back, and forget it."

  She did not like to be touched, so Oscar resisted kissing the vulnerable nape of her slender neck, but he stubbornly took his time tying the scarf. "There's more to hair than just keeping your neck warm."

  "A woman's crowning glory?" Sigrid gibed.

  "Something like that," he said, fluffing up the bow loops of the silk scarf.

  "Haven't you learned by now that I'm never going to turn into a sex object, much less a swan?" she asked and reached back to flatten some of the bow's exuberance. Oscar's face as he sat down across the table from her was so exasperated that Sigrid couldn't help smiling.

  "Poor Nauman. Why do you keep bothering with me?"

  "Damned if I know," he smiled back. "Want some ale?"

  "Yes, but I'd better not mix alcohol and whatever's in this painkiller."

  Her arm had begun to throb again and she went back into the kitchen for a glass of cold milk to wash down the tablet. She found that she was as hungry as Nauman had predicted and for a few minutes they devoted their attention to the food.

  "Tell me about John Sutton," she demanded when the first edge was off their hunger. "What were you doing out at McClellan?"

  "It was one of those interdisciplinary seminars, a sort of academic happening in support of the peace movement. John was president of McClellan's SDS that year. Val was a cute little undergraduate full of innocence and optimism. Flower children hoping to better the world. I was old enough to know better, but I was just as naive. We thought we could make a difference."

  "And you did, didn't you?" She took a second sandwich and cut it in half. "The war ended."

  "Not soon enough," he said and sat lost in dark memory until Sigrid pushed half her sandwich at him. He looked at it, then began to munch absent-mindedly.

  "John Sutton," she prodded.

  "Bright. Wacky sense of humor. Played the guitar. Used to make up parodies of Bob Dylan songs-the whiney ones. Val played the autoharp. Quick ear. They hadn't met before, but one night when he played for us, she started echoing his tunes, then embellishing them. Solemn as a churchwarden the whole time. Her face-" Nauman took another bite of his sandwich, waiting for the right words to convey the odd attraction of Val Sutton's face. "What are those cats that look like Siamese except they're all brown? Burmese? Abyssinian?"

  Sigrid shrugged, not being a pet owner.

  "Think of a triangular face that's a cross between Nefertiti and an Abyssinian cat, with sleek brown hair falling to her waist. That was Val. You'll see. Not beautiful. Men don't notice her right away; but once they do,, they don't forget her. John never had a chance."

  He grinned, describing how artfully Val had managed John's wooing; how John, if he had been aware of her wiles, hadn't struggled against them.

  Sigrid, who had never so far as she knew turned any man's head but Nauman's, listened and briefly wondered how it must feel to have such power over someone's heart.

  "John loved to argue. We had several all-night sessions that summer, but I'd almost lost touch with them when he and Val came east four or five years ago. Vanderlyn's history department offered him an associate professorship and Val audited some of my classes. She's one of the curators at the Feldheimer and a pretty fair Sunday painter herself. I've lent them my place up at Connecticut several times and John and I've served on some committees together. The Mickey Mouse ones. They don't think we take the so-called important ones seriously enough. Administration usually does what it wants anyhow and why the hell they have to waste our time-"

  "John Sutton," Sigrid interrupted, having heard tirades against Vanderlyn's administration before. "Who were his enemies?"

  "I never heard that he had any. John was bright and opinionated, but not mean. Like last Wednesday when the CGC met and-"

  "The what?"

  "The Condensed CUNY Committee. That's what John called us. I've told you how the university tries to promote the idea that the different branches around the city are one big happy family?"

  Sigrid supposed so. She couldn't work up much interest in the politics of the City University of New York. Keeping up with politics within the NYD was tedium enough.

  "So CUNY subsidizes faculty dinners at one of the big hotels and we have to shell out some of our own money to break bread together and pretend we know each other. Except that the combined faculty's so large that it gets boiled down to senior members and one year it's for liberal arts and the next for the sciences, that sort of thing. This year it's the arts and John and I were sent to meet with delegates from the other schools at the Maintenon on Wednesday to set things up and there was this jackass from Brooklyn College who-"

  "Wait, wait!" Sigrid thumped the table gently. "The Maintenon? John Sutton was at that hotel two days before he died?"

  "Right, but it's not what you're thinking. The guy from Brooklyn was mad, but I can't see a linguistics professor going back to Brooklyn, whipping up a bomb, and sneaking back to plant it."

  "Forget about the linguistic professor. Just tell me everything about Wednesday, from the moment you and Sutton stepped into the place until you left."

  Sigrid procured a note pad while Oscar obediently cast his mind back to Wednesday morning.

  "We met in the lobby of the hotel shortly before ten. There were about fifteen of us. We met with a Ms. Baldwin, who looks about twelve but had all the facts and figures. Told us how much it would be with cocktails before and
wine during, and the difference in price if we had vichyssoise instead of fruit compote with crème fraîche

  – you sure you want to hear all this?"

  Sigrid nodded.

  "After the menu was settled, we all trooped up to have a look at the rooms available that weekend. The first would have been too crowded, the second was okay. Typical Cool Whip on the walls."

  "Cool Whip?"

  "Well, Sutton called it whipped cream. I thought it was more like the imitation stuff: you know, huge pictures of wistful dandies in lace pushing swings full of eighteenth-century airheads in an atmosphere of giddy abandon. Gods and goddesses. Lots of frothy pastel colors. The sort of things decorators drag in to go with the gilt and red velvet." His voice became mincing as he spoke into a imaginary telephone. "I need two and a half dozen Fêtes galantes and six billet doux. Cool Whip," he repeated firmly.

  "So what happened next?"

  "There were guys bustling around, setting up long tables, and Ms. Baldwin asked if anybody played cribbage because this was where some games company was holding its tournament Friday night. Sutton said yes, he was a contestant; and about that time the man who was running the tournament came in with Lucienne Ronay, so Ms. Baldwin introduced him to Sutton-Flit or Flyte or something like that-and presented the famed Madame Ronay to the rest of us. She informed us how honored she was that we'd selected the Maintenon and that was when the jerk from Brooklyn unctuously piped up and said, 'It seems we've also selected a very charming corner of the eighteenth century as well, Madame Ronay. We've been admiring your pictures. Are they the originals they appear to be?'

  "And John said, 'Appearances can be deceiving. This one's still wet.'

  "And everybody laughed."

  Nauman drained his glass. "Then Madame Ronay and what's his name went on about their business and we took another vote on whether all the arrangements were approved and the committee adjourned. That was it."

  Sigrid leaned back in her chair with her elbows on the armrests and started to tent her fingertips before her as she usually did when concentrating, but the position was uncomfortable with her taped arm and she had to rest it on the table instead.

  "Did you hear any of Sutton's conversation with the man from the games company?" she asked. "Did they seem to know each other?"

  "Wasn't much of a conversation. What I heard of it seemed to be the usual-'How are you? Looking forward to Friday night. How many players do you expect?' That sort of thing. But you know," he mused, "it was odd."

  "Yes?"

  "After he and Lucienne Ronay moved off and all the time Ms. Baldwin was babbling on about how the hotel would arrange the tables for the CUNY dinner, John kept glancing over toward him, like there was something about the guy that puzzled him."

  "Did he say what?"

  "No. He finally shrugged as if it wasn't important and started trying to be nice to the linguistics jerk from Brooklyn College."

  7

  AN explosives expert was summing up as Sigrid entered the conference room at headquarters and Captain McKinnon waved her to an empty chair near his while the expert continued.

  Judging from the crumpled napkins, soda cans and coffee cups, and the deli smells of pastrami and onions and mustard still redolent in the air, this session had begun with lunch.

  Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry were among the dozen officers seated around the long table. Sigrid had worked with the two younger detectives before and had watched with a slightly jaundiced eye the more-than-professional relationship developing between them. Lowry discreetly pantomimed that he'd get Sigrid a cup of coffee if she wished, but she shook her head and turned her attention to the bomb expert.

  He had covered a chalk board with diagrams of possible ways the bomb had been wired. Precisely how the detonation had been accomplished appeared open to question, since only slivers of wires, cherry wood, and battery fragments remained after the violence of the explosion.

  On the table before her lay one of the cribbage boards which the bomb squad had picked up at the Maintenon. Milled from heavy close grained cherry, it was twelve inches long by four inches wide by three-fourths inch thick, divided lengthwise on top by a curving pattern of two parallel rows of pegging holes. One row for each player, thought Sigrid, recalling the details Tillie had told her about the game. Each row contained one hundred twenty pegging holes so that whichever player pegged a hundred and twenty-one points first would win.

  The hardwood must have been difficult to work, but with a fine drill it would have been possible to hollow out quite a nice-sized chamber on the bottom. An hour or so of painstaking effort and the chamber would have become roomy enough to hold a small wad of explosive and some sort of trigger mechanism.

  When everything was taped into place, a piece of cardboard was probably cut to cover the hollow and the green felt backing neatly reglued. To the casual eye there would have been nothing to distinguish that cribbage board from the one Sigrid was holding.

  "No traces of radio or clock components," the bomb expert was saying, "so we don't think it was detonated by remote control or timer switches. Witnesses say play had begun about twenty minutes before the blast, so it was probably a switch that closed a simple circuit from batteries to the explosive itself. It takes about twenty minutes to play a game-in fact, some of the contestants were already beginning their second-so the switch probably involved a game-marking peg. Pull it up and zing went the springs of his heart. Or, just as easy, push it into the hole that stood for the first win and he turns out all his lights."

  "Any ideas about who?" McKinnon's face was grim.

  The expert shrugged. "Anybody who wants to spend an hour with a couple of technical encyclopedias could pick up the theory. And any bright ten-year-old could make the stuff with the right chemicals.

  "One thing, though," he added. "Whoever did it has probably done it before. There's a certain finesse here. This bomb wasn't meant to kill more than the one or two people in direct contact with this particular cribbage board. I don't care how many nuts call in and claim to have struck a blow for the freedom of caged canaries or death to all cribbage players-"

  "A private kill?" nodded McKinnon. "I wondered why the Feds weren't busting down our doors."

  "He could just as easily have blown up the whole ballroom if he'd wanted to," the expert hedged.

  "And you think he's done it before?" asked Elaine Albee, a fragile-looking blonde who'd made detective last year after bringing in three Central Park muggers single-handedly.

  "Look, people, this stuff packs a hell of a wallop. More than an amateur realizes, so amateurs always wind up with overkill. This guy used just enough to do the job.

  I don't say he's a professional killer, but I do say he's experienced."

  "Like a demolition worker," suggested Lowry as he doodled an exploding cribbage board on his note pad.

  "Or an ex-frogman," said the expert, who'd helped mine Haiphong Harbor.

  "Or one of those Mideast crazies," someone contributed.

  "Or maybe," suggested someone else, "a disgruntled bank teller with a grudge against Maritime National."

  "I'll run my data through the FBI's computers," said the explosives expert. "Maybe we'll get lucky."

  "In the meantime," Captain McKinnon told his troops, "we do it the old-fashioned way, people-shoe leather and interviews. Peters, what've you got on Wolferman?"

  "Wolferman, Zachary Augustus, of Central Park South," said Detective Peters, reading from his notes. "Caucasian male, age sixty-one, unmarried. Chairman of the board and principal stockholder in Maritime National Bank. According to his lawyer, after all the debts and some hefty bequests to distant relatives.

  servants, and various charities, the residual beneficiary is a cousin, Haines Froelick. The lucky Mr. Froelick will probably wind up with around six million."

  With two pre-school daughters and a third child on the way, Bernie Peters was lucky if he had six dollars left over between paychecks and his wistful sigh echoed around the r
oom. Almost palpable in the air were visions of Caribbean resorts, sleek cars, and expensive baubles.

  "The cousin was at the Maintenon last night, too, wasn't he?" asked McKinnon.

  "Yes, sir. Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper said they spent a lot of time together. Met for dinner and played cribbage two or three nights a week. They were in last year's tournament out on Long Island and the year before that at one down in Raleigh. Housekeeper says they bickered a lot but that they were as close as brothers. Mr. Froelick's parents died when he was a kid and his aunt, Wolferman's mother, sort of adopted him."

  "What's Froelick's financial standing?"

  "I haven't gotten that far on him yet, but he has rooms at the Quill and Shutter Club about two blocks from Wolferman. I figure he's not living on food stamps."

  "Quill and Shutter? Is he a writer?"

  "Amateur photographer. Putters around in the club's darkroom and gets some of his pictures in group exhibitions once in a while."

  Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper had proudly shown Peters a collage of hand-colored Polaroid prints of herself in her best black silk with her grandmother's cameo at her neck, a collage that had won Mr. Froelick first prize for best nonprofessional work in the club's annual exhibition four years ago.

  The housekeeper was younger than her late employer and his cousin, yet she seemed to look upon them both with a sort of maternal indulgence. "Not a bit of harm in either of them," she had told the detective, wiping away genuine tears. "Who could have done such a wicked thing?"

  "The housekeeper can't name a single person that didn't like him. Chauffeur says the same. Ditto the lawyer."

  "Everybody has enemies," rasped McKinnon.

  "Maybe the cousin was in a hurry to inherit," said Jim Lowry.

  "And what does an elderly Park Avenue club man know about building bombs?" Albee objected.

  "The battery for that bomb could have come from one of those instant cameras," the explosives expert reminded them.

  They grudgingly agreed that Haines Froelick should receive further attention.